Theresa May is determined to grab the worst Prime Minister ever crown from her predecessor, at least if her incompetence over the Grenfell tragedy is anything to go by. Her initial visit to the site to meet emergency service workers but pointedly not surviving residents was incredibly cold, and incredibly damaging. For millions, May's behaviour sums up the contempt she and her ilk have for working class people, and those in particular forced to get by with social security support. On top of all that, more failures have come out that impact and reinforce the reception of Grenfell as an episode in the class war. We learn the Tories were slapping each others' backs for diluting fire safety regulations earlier this year. While Tory-run Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council could have been investing more in service provision, it turns out they've doled out council tax rebates while local authorities in poorer parts of the country winced under the cosh of cuts. And lastly, according to the recently-defenestrated Nick Clegg, he met resistance on social housing from Dave and Osborne because it only "creates Labour voters". No wonder people are bloody angry.
And so the Tories are getting found out. The party of the spiv, the rentier, the money grubber, and the parasite are having their ugly character exposed to the full glare of the British public, and what they see is appalling masses of people who've previously regarded anti-Tory rhetoric as political knockabout. Grenfell has been compared to the Poll Tax, but it is more than that. Remember, the Tories got shot of Thatcher and rebooted successfully in time for the 1992 general election. No, this crisis is altogether more serious as it threatens the very party itself. For the Tories, it is a crisis of legitimation, and they run the risk of taking damage so serious that a lengthy period out of government is almost inevitable, regardless of when the next general election falls. Their deal with the DUP certainly won't save them.
This begs the question then, given Grenfell and their political complicity in the lead up to an unnecessary tragedy, how can they and Theresa May, as their reviled figurehead, stay on? Unfortunately, I am forced to report that the demands of the moment would likely see the Tories and May cling on for dear life. On the Prime Minister's fate, assuming she is still in position by the time I've finished writing this post, it suits the interests of too many for her to remain. Reports that Johnson has told his supporters to fall in behind the PM seem credible enough. He's already sharing the burden of Brexit with David Davis and disgraced serving minister Liam Fox. Does he want Brexit to be his and his alone? Absolutely not. Does he also want to take over at a time when not even his faux bonhomie can save the Tories from a looming disaster? Hell no. There is however one person who would be willing, even is she's definitely not able, and that would be the dread Leadsom. Thankfully for the Tories, there is no situation so dire that she could possibly be the solution. Yet she, unlike her titular boss, did go down and speak to residents in and around Grenfell. I wonder if she prefaced her remarks with "As a mother ...".
Because Tory fractiousness means all interests are served by May carrying on as a meat shield, it's unlikely a putsch would come. There's another reason too that increases her chances of staying, a problem (for them at least) they rate higher than the Brexit negotiations themselves. According to Tory whips, she has said there are four words explaining her decision to soak it up and stagger on: Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn. It is difficult to put into words how much the prospect of an insurgent Labour Party terrifies them. Though, irony of ironies, if everything in Corbyn's manifesto was implemented capital as a whole would benefit. But for them, it's an instinct. If capital is subject to greater controls and responsibilities by a party with a mass, politicised and radicalising base, anything could happen. Not least the relationship of command their class privileges entitle them to would be under threat. Their objections and fears is not about having to pay more tax or getting forced to recognise trade unions, it's about power. Their ideological penchant for small-statism is a recognition that their state can, on occasion, be turned against them and that certain sections of capital be made to pay the price of restructuring capital as a whole. See the Attlee government and Swedish social democracy, for example.
Whether that fear is groundless or not, for the Tories it is real. If you combine that with a sense of certainty they will lose the next election, that many of our newly-minted MPs quite like the idea of staying on in the House and aren't going to give up their seats, and the slim chance any election call would clear the provisions of the fixed term, an election looks unlikely.
While there are powerful forces that frame and are expressed through politics, is there anything May's premiership can do to stabilise the situation? Her immediate aim is getting Brexit sorted, but there are a number of other things she can do to try and detoxify the outfit she has so indelibly stained. Given that many Tories are cottoning on to how the public's patience with austerity is at an end, it would be sensible for May to try and enact some of the more Milibandist moments from her manifesto. Keeping the promised funding and parity of treatment for mental health immediately springs to mind, for example. Though going too far in this direction could invite Tory rebellion, making her fatally dependent on Labour votes - assuming Labour agrees. I also expect attempts to try and knock Labour off course - she's likely to revisit her duff counter-terror strategy and, in what would be a surreal replay of the election, dare Corbyn not to back her. Whatever May tries, it's going to be scrappy, and it will certainly be unedifying.
Quite apart from their crisis now, the election reconfirmed their declinist tendency. Managing Brexit, running a feeble government, navigating inner party division, stymieing crisis bleeds here, there, and everywhere, it would stretch the most able of politicians. Theresa May, fortunately for us, doesn't come close to this and cannot but exacerbate her party's problems further.
It's taken me almost a week to write about Labour's result, that's how shocked I was. Just as that exit poll plunged millions of Labour supporters into gloomy depression in 2015, the one from last Thursday was an occasion of such jubilation that it will live on in the party's collective memory forever. I know it's been said, but it should always be said: we have not seen such an upset since 1945, we have never seen a turnaround of its like in such a short period of time, nor have we seen a politician with such abysmal ratings rise as quickly in the public's estimation. Labour did not win the election, but that banal statement reminds us the formalities of official politics cannot grasp the significance of what has happened.
Among Jeremy Corbyn's achievements are:
1. The destruction of the near-religious totem of the centre ground.
2. Providing proof that leading political opinion with a clear programme instead of kowtowing to it can lead to electoral success.
3. Linking with the above, showing that winning former Labour voters back from UKIP didn't and doesn't require making concessions to the right.
4. The ability to turn out large numbers of voters usually alienated from the electoral process - to Labour's benefit.
5. Using the election to politicise millions of people.
6. Building a reach unparalleled in British politics, bring together an electoral coalition that saw safe Tory seats tumble, leafy Labour marginals strengthen, and winning the 18-24 demographic in Scotland away from the SNP and the dead end of nationalist politics.
7. Creating dozens of marginal seats that, with one more heave, could easily fall to Labour.
8. Destroying the austerity myth to the extent that the Tories are now openly discussing its abandonment.
9. Inflicting a defeat on the Tories so profound they may never recover without painful self-adjustment.
10. Positioning Labour as an obvious government-in-waiting with the polls now putting them ahead of the Tories.
And all this in two years. Remember, under Kinnock and John Smith it took just over nine years to build up the momentum to the point Labour looked a dead cert for government, and even then it took the Tories' mishandling of Black Wednesday before winning was a foregone conclusion. Yes, undoubtedly the dementia tax debacle was very helpful, and May's mishandling of the terror attacks didn't rally the Tory vote like they were hoping, but had these not happened the same underlying dynamics would have been in play.
How to explain the success no one saw coming, and how did Corbyn manage to win over a varied demographic range? It all goes back to what happened these last two summers and what Corbynism, as a movement, is.
Readers may recall my why I voted for Jeremy Corbyn in the last leadership contest. Part of it had to do with a protest against the appalling behaviour of the Parliamentary Labour Party (nice to see a line get drawn under that with a standing ovation in the Commons today), and because what Corbynism represented. Basically, Corbynism is a movement of what I like to call the networked worker. What does this mean?
This is another way of describing what Italian Marxist and co-author of the celebrated Empire, Antonio Negri, calls the socialised worker (it also gets a look-in in Paul Mason's Postcapitalism). In an argument he has made since the 1970s, proletarians (i.e. people who sell their labour power for a set time in return for a wage or salary) have been undergoing something of a recomposition - an idea that's hardly news as far as this blog is concerned. However, rather than the banal observation that post-industrialism and the emergence of the knowledge economy doesn't mean much beyond the physical or otherwise character of commodities, for Negri it is a profound development.
To precis his argument, Negri argues that the working class under capitalism has undergone three broad phases. The first, when Marx was writing, coincides with the infancy of heavy industry. Here, formerly independent artisans and peasants are compelled to enter the factories in large numbers under pain of starvation. Here, they submitted to the command of the employer in return for (often poor) wages and expected to undertake a number of tasks. This was the age of the 'skilled worker': they became skilled at the work they had to perform and through their interaction with the technique of the day were able to build up an overarching picture of the labour process at their work. Simultaneously, thrown together in such numbers and individuated by the wage the skilled worker came to understand they had collective interests in common, and its from this period they started working autonomously of capital and against it by building labour parties and labour movements to better their lot and advance their interests.
As it grew in strength and power, achieving a breakthrough in Russia and badly threatening the social order of Europe after the First World War, capitalist management struck back. The innovation of Henry Ford's assembly line and Frederick Taylor's scientific management worked at breaking the power of workers in the workplace by subordinating the labour process to tight control. Taylor's time and motion studies were ostensibly about making work more efficient, but had the consequence of appropriating skill and knowledge about the work process and making it the property of management. This phase, the age of the 'mass worker' was a qualitative extension of the big enterprises into huge estates of factories, of an increase in scale and the full integration of industrial and finance capital. But it also meant labour was more alienating and simple. Capital had leverage over labour because the complexity of the division of labour was boiled down into a set of simple and repetitive tasks. In short, what Taylorism and Fordism managed was to make labour almost entirely abstract, to the point where any worker could be taken off any point of the assembly line and set to work on another with the minimum of training. Matching this extension of command down to the minutiae of work was, in the economic sphere, Keynes-inspired interventionist policies and, following the Second World War, the development of mass consumerism to complement mass production.
For Negri, the late 1960s saw this settlement start to fray. Whereas the mass strike was the weapon of choice for the skilled worker, to this repertoire the mass worker added occupations, symbolic acts of resistance, and, most crucially, the refusal to work. Despite the alienation at work, nevertheless the simultaneous positioning of workers as consumers deepened the individuating effects of the wage. Living standards grew, expectations grew, and the sophistication of the workers grew and increasingly sat uneasily with the top-down planning of Keynesian capitalism. Small wonder that as the 60s came to a close, movements from outside the institutionalised patterns of class compromise and conflict emerged and re-emerged in this period.
The abstraction of labour and the struggles of the 60s and early 70s for Negri revealed another truth about society: that capital had fully subsumed the social. While in Britain we tend to associate this with the penetration of ever greater areas of social life by market relationships, Negri argued that his native Italy and other Western countries were basically 'social factories' in which every facet of life contributed to capital accumulation in some way. There was no "outside" to capitalism: the social was permeated by capital and the logics of capital (hence why Pierre Bourdieu is so useful). Negri argued that under these circumstances, the nature of work shifted away from the production of (material) commodities to the business of reproducing the relationships underpinning the social factory. For instance, consider the millions of jobs in advanced countries tied to the public sector, of educating, surveilling, managing, healing, caring. These provide essential infrastructure that no complex society can manage without. Capital has also made a good fist out of directly profiting from this shift through the selling of professional services. For Negri, this signals the coming of the 'socialised worker' for whom the production of social relations is the object of their labour. In addition, this labour is immaterial; it cannot be appropriated directly as per the preceding generations of workers. The instrument of work here is the brain. Its use can be rented out, but suddenly the relationship between capital and labour shows up what has been the case all along: that the former is utterly dependent on the latter.
There's more bad news for capital, according to Negri. Immaterial, intellectual labour produces social relations and information. It means as a whole, as brains are set to work on particular projects the skills and knowledge acquired doesn't stay under lock and key. It's inseparable from those brains and effectively becomes part of a general intellect. As the collective knowledge of living labour grows, the relation between capital and labour becomes ever more stark. The former appears more parasitic, swooping in, trying to throw up fences around information and generally acting as a fetter on the free development of human culture. In this context, attempts to colonise the minds and imaginations of people through institutions and culture make sense. Ideas have always been a battleground in the class struggle, but in the age of the socialised worker the new front takes in the very components of consciousness. However, Negri is clear (and why his Marxism is so resolutely optimistic): the balance is shifting toward living labour and capitalism is becoming increasingly obviously superfluous. It's only a matter of time before the overwhelming mass of people realise it.
What has this got to do with what has happened to the Labour Party and its fortunes? In my view, the coalescing of the socialised worker is speeding up. It's condensing thanks to the invention of social media. The coming of the internet illustrates perfectly what Negri has written about. Software houses, IT firms, and social media monopolies do not train their key workers - they appropriate knowledges programmers (for instance) have acquired outside the sphere of work, through formal education and their own self-directed adventures in programming languages. Effectively, they're poncing off the general intellect. Social media has elevated this even further by capturing and storing your behaviour, amalgamating them into big data sets, and using your online comings and goings as a force or production, as a means of selling advertising space. Yes, capital and the internet reinforces Negri's observations about its parasitism. However, the internet and social media has another consequence: it's multiplying lines of contact between people, bringing more coherence to the general intellect as information is freely shared back and forth in defiance of propriety rights. It is driving forward the notion that work should be something you enjoy and "find yourself" in. It's effectively secularising the ethos and expectations of the socialised worker and extending it to those in occupations that retain skilled and mass worker characteristics. Employers often complain about not finding young people enough who'll work minimum wage in warehouse jobs or grubbing in fields for strawberries. This cultural shift and transformation of expectations is one reason why.
That is why I talk about the networked worker as opposed to just the socialised worker because everyone, regardless of the character of their work, are wirelessly wiring up and being drawn into the general intellect, of a social life increasingly distant to and alienated from the increasingly petulant demands capital makes. Class still matters, but it is being redefined and conflict is playing out in diffuse and multiple ways across axes of relationships within and extending beyond workplaces and immediate employer/employee relations. Hyper-individuated, the networked worker nevertheless is coming round to the view that they hold interests in common. And this is where the realm of theory touches down in political reality. The austerity and market fundamentalist policies the Tories have overseen, combined with scapegoating scaremongering is build up a head of grievance which, above all, cuts against the emerging consensus of what the good life is: freedom to be your own invention, and freedom from the economics, the housing crisis, the debt, the hate and xenophobia, of all the artificial social ills that threaten this.
The pull of Jeremy Corbyn at the start of his leadership campaign was, put plainly, someone who stood against all that. Largely unknown up until that point, his anti-austerity politics may have been decades old but they were absolutely of the moment. Because they were relevant and attractive, despite being forged in the class struggles of the 1970s the conjuncture - of decomposing Blairism, anaemic social democracy, and a seemingly triumphant neoliberalism - ensured his was the most modern politics. Corbyn was a lightning rod, a strange (and unlikely) attractor around which hitherto unorganised and raw layers of networked workers gathered over the course of his first year as leader and remaking the Labour Party in the process so it better reflected the realities of 21st century class politics. And then when the general election itself was called, the same process repeated itself on a far grander scale. This time it wasn't a couple of hundred thousand drawn to Jeremy Corbyn and Labour, it was millions, aided by the waging of the electoral battle across the peer-to-peer circuits social media enables. Corbyn, despite what the naysayers said, has saved the Labour Party and virtually guaranteed it the next general election because his simple anti-cuts politics, his authenticity and utter absence of cynicism swims with the stream of the general intellect. Rebooted Labourism with its social media savvy sensibility, its inclusivity, its message of hope and optimism bedded around a positive class politics of the overwhelming majority explains how networked workers from the cleaner and shelf stacker to the lifestyle consultant and marketing manager were pulled into its train. And what is more, the overt politicisation of the general intellect means Labour's vote can only but grow. The young are being born into and coming of age within this culture, this new politics of class. And its points of multiplication are reaching out to Tory supporters and bringing them in, corroding and challenging the irrationalisms and unthought assumptions underpinning that politics.
What is happening to Labour is the future. Britain, as the world's first industrial nation showed the rest of the globe its destiny. With the linkage between a transforming Labour Party and the networked worker accomplished, it's quite possible this little island could be about to do the same for politics.
Taking a break from politics for a night because. However, it hasn't escaped my notice that 36 new Labour MPs were elected to the Commons last Thursday (well, 35 if you take of Chris Williamson as he is a repeat offender). That means I get to dust this down this (lightly edited) advice again from earlier in the year. Readers may recall its appearance in the wake of Labour's victorious by-election in Stoke. Some might ask what do I know about politics, and who the hell am I to proffer advice to Labour's newly-elected? After all, I'm just an ordinary member with a keyboard and internet connection. Well, unsolicited advice comes with the territory. If you happen to not be a MP, which is most of you, I hope this gives good insight into what a good MP is supposed to do
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Okay, well done, you've won your election and you're into your first week in the Commons. All of a sudden you're expected to be an advocate, a lobbyist, a leader, a tribune, an example, and an office manager more or less from day one. Oh yes, and you don't have much power either. Did no one tell you that? But you do have a pretty hefty salary. Your first decision is what you're going to do with it. You can trouser the lot, but that's not recommended. Nor is doing the workers-MP-on-a-workers-wage schtick if you don't want ostracising, which isn't good for getting stuff done on behalf of the people you're representing. So, once the PLP has taken its share (ah, you weren't told about that either), and with plenty left over a yearly donation to CLP/branch funds is a must, whether the local party is cash strapped or not. Also, during the last Parliament Ruth Smeeth was one of the few MPs to refuse the 10% pay rise and instead used that cash to fund charitable causes in her Stoke North and Kidsgrove constituency. Doing that or something similar is the right thing to do, and has the happy consequence of paying itself back many times over in goodwill.
That's the easy bit. Then comes the sorting out your staffing. The first rule here is do not employ your family. Conservative MPs are buggers for doing this. Nearly every Tory MP whose office arrangements I know something about employ otherwise unemployable husbands and wives and sons and daughters. All at the top of IPSA pay scales, funnily enough. Also, they tend not to get too much heat from the media for it. As you're Labour, if you're daft and go down this route there's a much greater chance you'll cop for it. So don't. Second, it is absolutely crucial you have two operations, regardless of whether you represent a London constituency or not. You need parliamentary staff (one usually suffices when you're a backbencher) and staff in a constituency office.
Your parliamentary assistant is useful for briefing notes, speeches, popping down to the Commons library, tours for constituents, babysitting guests and a thousand and one other things. Just don't get them washing your laundry or driving round London doing your shopping. That. Is. Not. What. They're. For. There is another, understated advantage for having permanent parliamentary staff. They will hang around and socialise with other bag carriers. This is good, so make sure you hire someone gregarious. Because they can do a lot of networking for you. If you're interested in making a splash in a particular policy area, a good staffer will have a working knowledge of what their mates are working on and might suggest meetings with such-and-such MP looking into something similar. That's the good, noble reason. Then there's gossip. You might have gathered by now, politics loves gossip and Westminster is full of it. Having a staffer helps keep you abreast of what's going on where indiscretions are rife and nothing stays under wraps for long. As much as you might dislike this sort of thing, you've got to have eyes and ears working for you because it will benefit you in some way down the line.
Constituency staff are slightly different but no less important. Unless you're from the the Paul Nuttall school of lazy arses, you're going to be in Parliament most of the time, so your constituency staff will be the main means by which the constituency and the members interact with you. So choose wisely. You don't want staff watching Jeremy Kyle all day instead of doing work. You don't want anyone taking a haughty attitude to members, and you certainly don't want employees causing embarrassment by inappropriately using your constituency property when you're not around. My recommendations would be two or three staff who don't necessarily share your brand of Labourist politics, which is good for advice/speaking truth to power. So go on, hire a Progress member and a Corbynist. Make sure you take on people with good writing and communication skills - they will be making representations on your behalf to ministers and sending things to constituents in your name. Preferably, hire people who live in or will move into your constituency and so know what it's like living there. And, this cannot be emphasised enough, employ party members. Membership is no guarantee of good judgement, but party members more likely have an eye for bits and bobs of casework that have local and national party political ramifications. Also, as members in the local party they straight away strengthen your base and will likely build close relationships with councillors and key local activists. The gossip function applies here too. Staff, however, aren't robots. Turn over is quite high, partly because there is no career progression. So give them autonomy. Allow them to fill their notebooks with contacts, to go on visits to local employers, public bodies, charities, etc. Give them projects to do and goals to work towards. Don't be an overbearing boss, don't micromanage and ensure you don't employ anyone as office manager with that kind of attitude. If you treat them well, take them seriously, listen to them, you will have their loyalty and support beyond the terms of their employment.
On your relationship to your constituency party, take it very seriously. Only fools don't believe the CLP is the boss. Remember, you're only going to Westminster because the Labour badge was against your name. So be hands on, but not too hands on. Make sure you turn up to constituency meetings and give your report. If you're invited to a local party event, make sure you're there much more than not. Go out for drinks with members after meetings. Organise affordable socials and muck in. Even accept the odd dinner invite, and not just with the nice middle class professionals who want to show you their bookshelves. Have time for people, don't give politicians' answers in meetings, and listen. One thing you'll find are lots of irritating members like me: people wanting to tell you how to do your job. Take the time to respond as the one thing you want to avoid is a reputation for having a tin ear. And if you haven't got it, you're going to have to dig deep wells of patience - there's no way round it. At the same time, don't be afraid to push your politics. The sad fact is the best place to go to avoid talking politics is a Labour Party meeting, so change that, politicise things, work to persuade members of the merits of your views. Also, be very clear and provide a political rationale for the two or three priorities/hobby horses you have and update folks on any progress made. The members chose you and are invested in your success, so make them feel part of it.
While we're talking constituencies, you simply must be all over yours like a rash. Good staff can cover for your absence some of the time, but you should lead from the front. This is doubly important in marginal seats, for obvious reasons, but also "stronghold" working class seats like Stoke Central to break the cycle of disenchantment and disengagement. Do the bulk of your surgeries. Make sure you or a staff member attends stuff you're invited to. Make sure you have an extremely good relationship with local unions and do what local members ask. Keep an eye on new businesses opening up and get in touch to offer support. Work to bring people together around common interests and projects. Build a good working relationship with the local authority, whether Labour-run or not, but do not be afraid to take them to task or go to war with them when necessary. And campaign hard by helping out local councillors, running your own doorknocking/leafleting sessions, and supporting local Labour Group priorities. Show you're an attentive, dynamic MP by putting yourself out there.
Last of all, remember you're a member of the PLP. You're in a privileged position, but that doesn't grant you a privileged point of view. You may be clever, be a good organiser, possess a silver tongue, great charisma, or an unaffected manner, but you're no better, smarter, or savvier than the great bulk of Labour activists. Luckier, maybe. Do bear that in mind as your brain starts playing host to the parliamentary ways of doing things. As an opposition MP, your powerlessness will be reinforced every time the Tories push through legislation that attacks our people. As you dwell inside a media bubble, all of a sudden things that barely registered when you were a civilian loom large in yours and others' imaginations. Both of these work together into a commonsense in which Parliament and getting power is the be-all and end-all, and that will work to distort your view of the world. Hence why you need good staff and good relations with your constituency party, these people can anchor you.
The second thing to remember is what politics is about. It's the interests, stupid. The Labour Party is the political expression of the labour movement, and was founded by the organised working class and the progressive middle class to prosecute their interests. Arguably, its failure to do so is the root of the party's malaise from Blair to just before the general election. The story is the same in France, where too many of our people have been abandoned to the fascists, and in Italy. Your job as a Labour Party activist who happens to be a MP is to follow those interests through. Westminster's boarding school/pressure cooker environment can engender the feeling of all MPs being in it together, regardless of party. You start feeling that way you need to shut that shit down. Go ahead, pursue friendly, congenial relations with politicians from other parties. Even go out of your way to attend maiden speeches - believe me, they'll remember who was there on the benches opposite - but never forget they're means to an end to get your way, the party's way. Because they will be doing exactly the same to you. Remember, it's only Labour MPs who think the party's there for the common good. The Tories aren't naive enough to entertain such a delusion.
And one last point on loyalty. Not only are you in the Commons because of the Labour badge, some of you were lifted into the chamber because of Jeremy Corbyn. Keep abreast of the plots and the rumours of plots on the backbenches, but the world does not need another Jess Phillips. If you have complaints, don't moan to the Daily Mail about them but share them with your constituency people. You would be surprised by how many appreciate being told what some regard as privileged information. And always keep an eye on the future. Labour Party membership is mushrooming again, diminishing the sway the PLP have over the wider party even further. If you enjoy being an MP - and it is a fantastically privileged job to have - bear in mind reselections will be determined by an overwhelmingly pro-Corbyn membership.
That is all for now.
Time to return to a recurring theme of this blog: that the Conservative Party is an organisation in long-term decline. On its weight among the British electorate, the demographic profile of its support - particularly along the lines of age, and its long slide from a membership in the couple of million to somewhere between 130k-150k today, the tendency is pronounced and obvious. How does this argument stand up in light of the general election results? Have the Conservatives managed to revive their fortunes and seen off the decline?
Ordinarily, Theresa May's "team" would have, should have done very well indeed. 42% and 13.6m votes is in the range that delivered Margaret Thatcher her 1983 and 1987 landslides. May too could have looked forward to one if it wasn't for those pesky kids. And the small matter of genius incompetence. Nevertheless, despite losing seats and falling into chaos, the result appears to challenge the declinist thesis: the vote is the highest any party has polled since John Major's post-war record of 14m in 1992. Yes, May managed to win more ballots than even His Blairness in 1997, and she presided over a vote increase of 5.5% on 2015's tally, well over anything Dave pulled off in his confrontations with Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. On her watch, the Tories made aggressive inroads into SNP-held seats, pensioning off Angus Robertson, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and Alex Salmond: Scottish nationalist scalps don't come much bigger than these. And also UKIP completely melted away with large numbers of its voters switching to the Conservatives.
May's achievement, if it can be called that, is a recomposition of the Tory vote, a rebuilding of a coalition that fractured under the hammer blows of New Labour in the 1990s, and had gradually bled away to third parties. Talking tough on immigration and sabre rattling on Brexit directly appealed to socially conservative Conservative voters put off by Dave's flashy liberalism, metro-elitism, and commitment to things like sexual and gay equality. Cornering the market as the unionist party in Scotland given Scottish Labour's disarray (at least, before the election), Ruth Davidson and friends were boosted by Nicola Sturgeon's independence ambush. Here, the usually canny SNP leader miscalculated people's appetite for another referendum. She wasn't to know a general election was hatching in Theresa May's head, but for the sake of short-termist pressure she alienated soft SNP supporters and antagonised enough unionists to electorally damage her party, whenever the election was going to drop. To demonstrate the pain, the last time Scotland returned more Conservative MPs than Thursday was 1983.
Kippers on the one side, Scottish unionists on the other. But May also played big for disaffected sections of Labour's vote, not all of which came via UKIP. As folks know, around a third of Labour supporters voted to leave the European Union last year. These were the sections of the party's support that tend to be older, retired, and clustered in "traditional" (i.e. labour intensive) working class occupations. They too tended to be more socially conservative and were, if you believe the amount of polling and research done over the last few years, sceptical of the London leftyism of Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn - particularly the latter in regard to issues around the military and national security. Here, May's manifesto was designed to win these people over with its promises of more job security, doing something about housing, intervening in the economy, keeping "our" nukes and, yes, stopping those immigrants from nicking jobs. There was undoubtedly some success in this regard. Here in Stoke, we retreated in the north constituency and lost the south pretty much on this basis (aided in no small part by the collapse of UKIP too). Over in Ashfield the election saw it move from what seemed to be a solid Labour seat to a tight marginal with 460 votes separating the two parties. Undoubtedly the Tories would have done even better had Nick Timothy not secreted a grenade in the party's manifesto.
This then give us May's coalition: the traditional Tory base of anti-Labour workers, the petit bourgeois, the business and professional salariat, and the rich with unionist voters, former kippers, and a sizable chunk of anti-Corbyn ex-Labour voters. On this occasion it wasn't enough to win because Labour, at short notice, was able to mobilise a sizeable coalition and a movement not seen in British politics since 1945. But of that another time. Still, the question has to be asked. After cobbling together a new coalition of voters and turning the Tories around in Scotland, have the Conservatives escaped their decline?
No is the answer. Sociologically speaking, the Tories have recuperated their declining base by bringing in new voters but they haven't escaped the track they're on. The problem is these new additions are strata who are in decline too, and come with more than a degree of volatility. Their 2017 "borrowed" voters are disproportionately older than the general voting population, so while they're still more likely to vote than the young they're not getting replaced like-for-like as they shuffle off this mortal coil. Yes, age is a dynamic thing and the commonsense view that people become more conservative as they get older is true enough (or, to be more specific, people become more concerned with security). The problem the Tories have is their policies have, for the last seven years, relentlessly attacked people in work, and younger people in particular. With their indifference regarding wages, security at work, job quality, house building, and their continued application of zombie austerity, they are bedding down a reflex hostility to their party that will last for longer, which is going to negatively impact their chances among these age groups, while their present support continues to die off. Second, thanks to the UK-wide pro-Corbyn surge Scottish Labour are in contention again as a unionist left alternative that some who went Tory this time could find attractive in the future. This poses an issue for the SNP as well, as a good chunk of the support for Scottish independence is left wing and consciously anti-Tory. As the possibility of IndyRef2 recedes into the distance, Labour in Scotland become the best bet again of keeping the Tories out of power, undermining the SNP pitch. The kipper vote is also highly excitable - having broken once from mainstream parties, they could disappear again if the Brexit negotiations go down a softer (sensible) path, and Nigel Farage makes good his threatened comeback. And lastly, the ex-Labour leave voters are clustered in occupations simultaneously vulnerable to social, cultural, and political consequences that don't bode well for any kind of Conservative political project. In sum, there is a strong case for regarding Thursday's result the high tide of the Conservative vote. It is now set to go out, never to come in for a long time indeed.
The Conservatives have accomplished a temporary reprieve. While they wriggle and agonise over the predicament May's hubris has landed them in, its support is stronger (but not necessarily as stable) vis a vis the Tories were under Dave. Yet events, my boy, events could very quickly ramp up the declinist tendency. The consequences of Brexit and the toxic partnership with the Democratic Unionists look all set to do this. Therefore, that begs the question: can they get out of this pickle long-term? Having posed this question before, the answer was pretty much along the same lines Theresa May attempted. The Canadian Tories won office in 2011 on the basis of one-nationism and pitching an inclusive national identity that reached out to aboriginal peoples and the recently migrated. And they were defeated by liberal hero Justin Trudeau in 2015 because they governed just like any other bunch of toxic Tories. Pitching themselves as one-nationists has, as we've seen, helped build up a wider coalition of voters that appealed mostly to declining constituencies. The problem is this cannot possibly work again. The second option is to try and scare voters silly. While the social density and interconnected character of the electorate at large is growing, this proceeds alongside a profound atomisation inculcated through work and institutions. This reinforces a message and outlook of individual responsibility, and individualises angst and insecurity. Over the past seven years the Tories have deepened the processes driving this by introducing more marketisation and further locking down collective rights, and whipped up convenient scapegoats as means of mass distraction. Therefore cynically posing as the bearers of security while being responsible for the reproduction of insecurity is possible. However, as this election has shown the scares don't work anymore, partly because the old media pparatus used to deliver it is much diminished and the networked worker draws on other resources to help make up their mind. Nostalgia and abuse are broken as a means of winning elections and improving a Conservative party's fortunes.
Labour, as I have argued has and still is undergoing a recomposition process of its own, except it represents the rising class of networked workers who are poised to become the overwhelming majority of people-in-general. And not just here, but everywhere. The Tories if they are to comeback have to do the impossible and contest Labour for the political leadership of the networked workers, or at least persuade enough of them to keep their chances going. Looking at the state of them now it seems a massive ask, especially as more and more consciously anti-Tory young people come of age, enter the electoral rolls and get involved in wider politics. Yet that is the only way to future victories, as a party that maintains the social order - as a strong and stable institution, if you like - but does not seek to dynamite it for narrow advantage, be it party political or as favours for one section of capital over another. If the Tories are to win again, their model is the boring, plodding but dependable and uncontroversial small c conservatism of an Angela Merkel married to the seductive a-place-for-everybody inclusivity of one nation Toryism. There are Tories who see their Conservatism in this way, but getting there would require the party undergo a full body transplant, of it becoming something else. That said, no one should underestimate the British Conservative Party's capacity to do whatever it take to grab power, even when it is seemingly boxed into an impossible political situation.
What an amazing night. We'd had hints from the YouGov and Survation polls that things were going to be close, but even those who allowed a few meagre rays of hope into their hearts were haunted by the memories of so many times the pollsters were wrong. And not forgetting that a good chunk of polling opinion still indicated the Tories could look forward to commanding a thumping majority in the House. There are so many things that can be written about the 2017 general election, but more on trying to understand the return of two-party politics, the battering the SNP took in Scotland, and the Tories' love-in with the Democratic Unionists later. Right now I want to focus on the result itself or, rather, why so many pundits got this election completely wrong.
On one level, it's obvious. Your Dan Hodges, Andrew Rawnsleys, Laura Kuenssbergs and practically everyone who has a berth in broadcast and print media didn't have all the facts, and then didn't join them up the right way. What they sorely lacked, and why they get caught out regularly is because they do not have a sociological imagination. That is the simple but obvious (and yet overlooked) idea that society consists of and is constituted by dense webs of social relationships, and their influence effectively makes us as individuals (or subjects, if you insist on the parlance). And, of course, these relationships are configured in particular ways and certain types of them exert greater weight than others. The role of sociology is to untangle these dynamics and produce research projects and theories aimed at trying to understand how they work. What you then do with such knowledge is the subject of much debate, but as far as I'm concerned it's about providing theory and analysis the labour movement finds useful so it can meet socialist objectives.
The diagnosis of one problem begs another. While commentators and pundits are, in general, intelligent (with some notorious exceptions) and quite capable of reading books, why have none of them cottoned onto the fact that a) political parties are coalitions of strata of forces and interests, b) that political parties reflect deep underlying structural principles that organise broad swathes of social life and impact on all of it in some way, and c) when there is movement among these forces, political parties and votes at election time express them? It's not because they're especially ignorant, nor that the ideas of political sociology are particularly difficult or airy-fairy: it has everything to do with the situation they find themselves in.
Consider this, for example. I felt very optimistic before going into last night's results, despite past experience telling me to keep a hard head. Disappointment was the default setting of socialist politics often times in recent years. Yet the optimism kept bouncing back, despite trying to shut it down. Why? I'm plugged into my social media echo chamber like everyone else, so that had an effect. At work, being surrounded by Labour supporters enthused by the campaign, that had an effect. Speaking to friends and acquaintances who have never voted before but were going to turn out for Labour, that had an effect. And lastly speaking regularly to students, most of whom take much more of an interest in politics than was the case for my generation at university, that had an effect. And you cannot discount the campaigning, especially that first weekend of the dementia tax where I saw previously sceptical voters (don't knows and againsts) all coming to Labour, that cannot but have an effect. It's a case of my being, i.e. what I do and who I come into contact with in everyday life, conditioning my consciousness. This works on all of us, all of the time, all our lives.
A similar sort of process is at work with our professional Westminster watchers, but is ramped up to a higher degree. Firstly, consider what mainstream commentators observe. They watch the comings and goings, the toings and doings of senior politicians. They see how MPs club together in the Commons, formulate policy, take legislation through the House and involve themselves in massive rows with one another. This, more or less, forms the basis of copy that comes to thousands of hours of broadcasting and millions of words year in, year out. And this is politics. What happens in the chamber matters simply because that's what appears to matter - it's where policy is brought forward and enacted into law. What goes on in politics outside, like local council and devolved administration stuff simply isn't on the radar, because they don't see it. Likewise, movements that occupy the streets or, indeed, transforming a political party are curiosities but unworthy of real analysis and understanding. It's all such a sideshow to Parliament's main event.
This focus is also bounded by the media the commentators produce. Famously, the BBC take its lead for what the hot politics stories are from the front pages of the broadsheets. Likewise, hacks in other operations parasite off the BBC and each other to fill the schedules, put stuff out, and meet the insatiable appetite for hot takes. The result is little time for thinking, a scramble for a story or an original angle, and a tendency toward herding thanks to the recursive universe generated from the quantum foam of chatter. It produces a mode of thought that is based entirely on appearance without trying to understand what may lie behind what immediately presents itself. For instance, the Tories are the new party of the working class because minimum wage rises. Labour's members have foisted the disaster onto the party because atomised members of the public tell focus groups. There is no sense of movement, little idea that parties as expressions of interest evolve and move, nor that the people who support them, actively or passively, have connections with multitudes of normal people that can pull, persuade, cajole masses of them and transform them into a collective that starts making its own history. As none of them regularly go on the doors outside of the capital, they have to rely on what the pollsters tell them and, as we saw last night, only two of the established firms come out of the election with any sort of credit.
The worldview of the pundits then is a distorted view, and it is also one shared not just with media people but with politicians too. Again, it's not because they're thick but because they have a common outlook underpinned by an economy of how media people need to do media things. What last night's result has done is bust it wide open. They will settle on some explanation - young people, May's missteps and u-turns, the weather - before it closes up again and returns to its recursive ways. What they won't consider is what actually happened: the political mobilisation of a rising class of working people, of the networked worker overcoming its atomisation and making its presence felt through the Labour Party. And because they don't know, let alone understand this composition of a new constituency of people, they are likely to get caught on the hop time and time again.
It takes chutzpah to suspend national campaigning and then give a political speech about Saturday night's terror attack. But this is Theresa May and the modern Conservative Party has no qualms when it comes to turning a crisis into an opportunity. Naturally, May and her advisors are wily enough not to play the big P politics card but you have the genesis of a simple, touch-sounding black and white position they will use to browbeat voters into backing them as we enter the final stretch.
This morning May said "enough is enough", implying that Britain has been a soft touch for Islamist radicalism which, if that was the case, means she oversaw a dereliction of duty for the last seven years. But she doesn't mean that at all, it signifies a serious and potentially calamitous switch in direction when it comes to counter-radicalism and anti-terrorism. This is plain to see in all of her proposed four changes to policy. She said:
They [the terrorists] are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism ... it will only be defeated when we turn people's minds away from this violence and make them understand that our values - pluralistic British values - are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.
Well, yes. But no. The problem is this comes from the Douglas Murray/Henry Jackson Society's Islamism for Dummies guide. As Murray is bound to say something on this topic again soon, we'll save up a polemic until then. For the time being, it is enough to note that showing off British values to a bunch of befuddled thugs and telling them they are superior to the idiocies of Islamism isn't going to work. May is firmly on the terrain of the ideas delusion, that ideas in terms of elaborate and sketched out ideologies are the prime motivators of jihad. Yes. No. Why does a minuscule subset of Muslims find these views compelling and convincing? What is it about them that makes sense according to their everyday life? How are emotions - anger, frustration, anxiety, companionship, hope - fermented by Islamist ideas into intoxicating zealotry? Why is it men, and young men in particular, are the ones carrying out acts of violence informed by this crackers creed? After all, no women have undertaken Islamist terrorism in the West. And what of those who turn to Islamism without becoming ideologues, without chowing down on the virgins-in-the-afterlife hook? Homing in on just the ideas effaces individual biographies of jihadis, of the material circumstances of their life and their positions in the fabric of social life. We make our own history, but not under the conditions of our choosing as someone once said. Focusing on just Islamism is tantamount to saying Islamists are Islamists because Islamism. Not helpful, and it doesn't bode well for May's first "change".
Her second argument flows from the first. Islamism should be denied the safe space it needs to incubate, and that means governments should work in tandem to "regulate cyberspace". She'll be calling for traffic stops and toll booths on the internet superhighway next. Retro (out-of-touch?) buzztalk aside, this is more evidence of the ideas delusion. Jihadi content is easy to access with a little bit of Google wizardry. The violent imagery and propaganda vids of IS certainly act as bridging tools for some would-be Islamists. However, it's not the case that an exposure to this material causes Islamists. If you start watching this stuff rooting for IS indicates something else has already gone on. Mobilising people for any kind of politics is a process. Ideas have efficacy if, as we've already noted, it speaks a truth about someone's individual existence. Of crucial importance are the networks and relationships one has, and real or imagined grievances. The reason jihadi propaganda slides off most people is because those things do not align. Indeed, for a large number of young people who watch them, IS propaganda vids are merely an edgy subset of gross out videos. In short, for all sorts of reasons governments want tighter control of the internet and bedroom radicalisation offers a handy pretext.
Third, May wants to take on the real world safe spaces in which Islamism thrives. That means more bombing abroad, because that is sure to kick away a grievance prop jihadism draws upon, and taking the fight to Islamism at home. She said "there is - to be frank - far too much tolerance of extremism in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society." What on earth does this mean? Is she thinking about the Birmingham Trojan horse scandal, which was shown to be rubbish? Is she expecting educators to police the classroom to root out would-be jihadis from among the student body? And how about the safe space she reserves in Downing Street for delegations from Saudi Arabia, whose largesse for Wahhabism in the West is so well known that the EU officially regards it as the primary wellspring of Islamist terror. This is just incoherent and hypocritical nonsense playing to the gallery of newspaper editorials and the inchoate notion that "they", the public sector lefties, the cultural Marxists and the race relations professionals are destroying the fabric of Britain with liberal tolerance. Getting tough here is code for kicking experts and intellectuals, traditional hate figures for Tories and right wing hacks.
Her last pledge is to review the counter-terrorism strategy, which is just about the only thing I do agree with. Though you might have thought what with the security of the people at stake, this would be under constant monitoring and review. Therefore May would look at introducing new powers for the intelligence services and police, which takes us back to more monitoring, more surveillance. However, there is something very clearly missing from her pledge: more police. With 20,000 fewer coppers on her watch and firm refusal to rule out more recruitment or even further cuts, this is not a serious strategy for dealing with the problem. As former Met officer Peter Kirkham argued this afternoon, the government are lying about the number of armed officers and their funding, and no full well the removal of community constables has hampered the intelligence capabilities of our counter-terrorism efforts.
In short then, May's proposed strategy from the off is not interested in understanding the radicalisation process, thinks clamping down on the internet will fix it, and giving the security services new powers - and presumably new responsibilities - without reversing the cuts she personally oversaw and implemented. It's a bloody shambles, offers no improvements over what already exists that I can see, and one doomed never to work. A recipe that promises security, but will do nothing to stymie Islamism.
The pundits muttered dismissively about YouGov's shock poll putting the Tories just three points ahead of Labour, suggesting the election's outcome is edging toward a hung parliament. Reportedly, Jim Messina, the Conservatives' stat whizz on loan from the liberal heroes at Team Obama threw his head back and laughed. Just like someone else we know. And then today Ipsos Mori dropped their bomb: Tories 45%, Labour 40%. The unweighted poll (i.e. not controlling for differentiated turn out) actually puts Labour three points ahead. I can feel hope cloying its way into my heart.
This is no substitute for analysis, however. Cool heads are essential if the newly mobilised aren't to suffer disillusionment and despair if, after everything, the polls are proven wrong and Labour does worse than now expected. On this score, there are two tallies we need to keep an eye on: perceived economic competence and leader ratings. Since these questions have been asked, no party has won a general election who are behind on both. And, unfortunately, Labour is. That said the volatility of politics are proving Theresa May's undoing as her ratings plummet and Jeremy Corbyn's rocket upward. It is quite possible over the weekend the sliver of a gap between them vanishes and starts opening up on the other side. This. Election. Is. Killing. Me.
After an excruciating week for May that saw her nearly crumble in front of a below-par Jeremy Paxman, refuse to take part in the leaders' debate and sent a grieving Amber Rudd in her place, turn down Woman's Hour, rule out any local radio interviews for the remainder of the campaign, and now reeling under the news that the CPS are charging Craig McKinley, his South Thanet agent, and "campaign specialist" Marion Little for alleged electoral expense fraud, May had to really pull it out the bag for tonight's Question Time special. For his part, Jeremy's insurgency is assuming juggernautish properties. Unlike May, he's not under siege from a collapsing campaign nor a simmering rebellion, and a strong and stable performance in front of the Question Time audience would be the icing on the cake for a brilliant week. Who remembers Tuesday's stumble in the Radio 4 studio now?
May came first and needed to knock it out of the park. The first thing to remember is while May isn't comfortable in front of the public, tonight was her 24th appearance on Question Time. If she's no good with that format now, she never will be. And, overall, I think she came off alright. There were no stunning rhetorical flourishes, nor were there any big stumbles. It was competent enough - not polished, plenty vague, but little to frighten away the already committed Tory voter. The problem, however, is with the large numbers of undecideds out there. Here we have someone hyped by the media as the supreme politician, as a grown up versus the seat-of-the-pants juvenilia of Dave and Osborne. Coming across well matters. Relatable matters. Warmth matters. And she just can't do it. Asked about the public sector pay freeze for nurses, there was little sense of sympathy. Confronted by a woman with mental health difficulties and was dragged through a work capability assessment, there was no compassion in her response - just a technocrat's answer. As a rule, electorates are okay with people who don't connect as long as they understand ordinary people's problems, and unfortunately for May she tanks this every time.
Jeremy Corbyn on the other hand had a much better time of it - for the most part. He was more relaxed, more assured in his answers, more interested in listening to what people had to say. On every indicator, he as the anti-May. He showed command of his brief and was able to talk in detail about policy areas, which, considering May is the incumbent and offered vagueness and generality, is a key difference between the two and reflects terribly on the PM. This was especially the case on Brexit - May wouldn't be drawn on no deal, while Jeremy talked about the need to protect jobs and building a more equal society. Brexit means Brexit for May, for Corbyn Brexit means the fight for more and better jobs, and a more pleasant, safer, fairer Britain. A key difference.
Jeremy was doing extremely well until we came to Trident and nuclear weapons. He answered the points on Trident and the first use of nuclear weapons sensibly, on the importance of talking and diplomacy to ever avoid a situation where atomic warfare is a possibility, but some in the Tory third of the audience were determined to get blood and kept asking him whether he'd press the button. He wobbled and didn't offer a clear answer. There are various ways he could have answered it without a straight yes or no, like keeping all options open, doing whatever it takes to defend the country, listening to what the military experts say, and what not. But the audience member who came in after to attack the others who were gleefully criticising Corbyn for refusing to aggressively incinerate millions of people just about spared his blushes. However, the job was done and the press have got their meat for the weekend. Which, to be honest, is hardly news. Later on the IRA came back up and this presented him no difficulties whatsoever, revealing that he had defended Ian Paisley when moves were afoot to bar him from Westminster on the grounds that all voices needed to be party to a peace process, not just the ones you agree with. In all a good performance, sans the handling of the nuclear issue.
Who won? As a Labour supporter I'm obviously going to say Corbyn. But where it counted - on character, on giving a vision, on policy detail he was much better, clearer, and more serious than the Prime Minister. Nukes presented him a problem but his attitude is already baked into nearly everyone's choice, though that won't stop the press from using it to mobilise the Tory vote and try and snatch back some of the volatile ex-kippers that are slipping toward Labour. But even if he gave a totally flat performance, he still would have won. Theresa May strikes as an unsympathetic figure, and she needed something special tonight to try and put her crisis-ridden campaign back on course. She wasn't able to do that. Labour goes into the final weekend of campaigning with the wind in its sails. All the Tories have is scaremongering. It worked in 2015, will it work now? Or can Labour confound all the sage expectations - including my own - and deliver the biggest, most surprising, and sweetest victory in our party's history?
The very moment Jeremy Corbyn confirmed he would be attending this evening's BBC Election Debate in Cambridge, Theresa May lost the night. Whether the last day of May will, um, prove to be the end of May remains to be seen. Yet to hide from a debate and sending a subordinate to do it for you is a catastrophic mistake, especially as your pitch is all about your super-duper leadership. I hope it will erode her strong and stable branding among those kippers, normally-Labour-but people, and soft Tories set on giving "her team" a punt. And so, straight away, without Amber Rudd uttering a single word on her boss's behalf, the Prime Minister is wounded and her party is down on points. Only something exceptional could have won it for them.
Nevertheless, this debate was not without risk for the Labour leader. In 2015 when Ed Miliband appeared alongside the leaders of the other parties, minus Dave, it arguably fed into the coalition of chaos narrative the Tories ran with deadly effect. Having Rudd turn up loses that advantage - but there were still two possible difficulties Jeremy had to avoid during the debate. The first was Rudd herself. Unlike May, Rudd appears to relish these kinds of events and by sending her along the Tories thought Labour would put Diane Abbott up - in fact, she was daft enough to say so herself. Nevertheless, Rudd is a shouty, aggressive debater who goes straight in for character attacks. The way she filleted Boris Johnson at last year's referendum debate gave us an idea of what might have been in store. The second problem is how the tri-force of the Greens, SNP, and Plaid will play (seriously, why even is UKIP there?). Rudd was bound to talk up the possibility of coalition, so did Caroline Lucas, Angus Robertson, and Leanne Wood oblige the Tories and challenge Jeremy to take them up on it? Again, Nicola Sturgeon's coalition gambit in the 2015 debates inadvertently helped Dave get his message across. Similar talk hasn't bedeviled Jeremy anywhere near to the same extent, so you had to hope he had something prepared on this.
With those dangers in mind, the objective for Jeremy tonight was to squeeze the non-Tory vote as much as possible and start making inroads into the Conservatives' electoral coalition. Inducing a few cracks in it so the support starts trickling away from May and towards the smaller parties (or suppressing a despairing Tory vote) is, at this juncture, helpful.
In the end, there was no need to be worried. It was a scrappy debate as voices were raised and they tried drowning one another out. It meant Rudd's hyper aggression didn't materialise and her attacks on Labour barely registered either in the studio or the audience. This played to Dave's advantage in 2015 because he was able to assume the mantle of outsider, as someone picked on by the nasty SNP and the others. Rudd, on this occasion, wasn't able to strike the underdog pose. Having your boss arrogantly refusing to take responsibility was always going to do that. She had a go with the coalition of chaos nonsense but it fell flat. Dave succeeded because in making it about leadership he did at least turn up to one debate, and was able to let his opponents do the rest for him. This time there wasn't too much bickering between the anti-Tory parties. Leanne Wood laid a glove on Jeremy over Labour's record in Wales and its record in voting down progressive initiatives brought to the Assembly, but that was as far as it went. Angus Robertson wisely toned down the Scottish independence angle, even to the exclusion of mentioning another referendum, thereby denying the Tories a helpful attack angle and irritating English voters who, well, find it very irritating.
What would the take homes be? I think the small parties will all be pleased with their performance. Even Nuttall turned in a pitch his dwindling band of kippers would find cheer in, even if he was at one point reduced to shouting "What about Hamas?". Tim Farron had a good night with some of the best lines, such as "Where is Theresa May tonight? She might be outside your house, sizing it up to pay for social care." And I think the standout performances came from Caroline Lucas and Robertson - the latter for her enthusiasm but effectively targeted passion, the latter for his forensic dismemberment of the Tory record.
The ones that mattered were, of course, Jeremy's and Rudd's. As I said, Rudd was drowned out and when she was given space to speak her attacks were blunted and rendered ritualistic by weeks of robotic repetition without anything positive to offer. How would it have played among the undecided at home? It's unlikely to have stiffened the resolve of voters thinking of voting Tory. Perhaps Rudd wasn't on form, she is recently bereaved after all, which makes May's decision to send her along not just cowardly, but heartless too. Likewise, while the format didn't allow Jeremy to be as effective as his Paxo grilling, it was strong and stable, to use that phrase again. He got in attacks on food banks and homelessness, education, and was given opportunity to set out Labour's stall on terrorism and security. There were no wobbles, no difficulties, no sign of the alleged weakness attributed him by others. He set out and did what he needed to.
Will this debate have a material effect on the election outcome? If it does, it will impact most on the Tories. To have all the party leaders attack May for being frit is sure to put doubt in some minds. Cracking her coalition is the game, and at this stage every vote that drains away from the Tories makes the prospect of an overall majority, let alone a landslide, recede into the distance. No clear winners then, but one very obvious loser.
Another night, another poll. The latest for The Telegraph puts the Tories on 44% and Labour on 38%. A gap of six points, which follows last week's YouGov effort reporting a five per cent gap. I'm trying not to hope, so that excitable little beastie is getting packed away as we look at what's going on at the bottom of the polling. There's still no sign of the LibDem revival, and as we've talked about them recently it's time UKIP had their turn. For poll after poll has them tanking badly. Four per cent in this ORB poll, two per cent in YouGov. To think this ex-party, this brittle husk held together by small mindedness and the ambition to keep hold of one's councillor allowances once held British politics to ransom. Times they are a-changin' and they're changin' bloody quickly.
If UKIP doesn't disintegrate following post-general election acrimony, its dirty bomb of backward, hateful politics could see it eke out a long half life on the fringes of politics. The odd council seat could tip into its radioactive soup, but for the most part the party's own decay shall keep it contained. Harmless if handled properly, at least until such a time when powerful forces need a faux anti-establishment outfit for their establishment interests. Broken as the party is (and never forget who smoked them), shedding votes, members disappearing, it does still have a little room for manoeuvre. Parties may well be aspects of classes and class interests, but they still have agency, and it is within UKIP's gift to remain half-way relevant.
Understanding this requires a very brief lesson in recent history. At the European elections in 1999, 2004, and 2009 UKIP slowly built up a base of voters as the preferred middle finger to mainstream politics. It guaranteed air time here and there, but they were not regarded with the same degree of seriousness afforded the less influential but even more repugnant British National Party. They were a nuisance, particularly to those in mainstream parties wanting to get to Brussels. And that way they could have stayed, were it not for Dave's uncharacteristic stand over a matter of principle: equal marriage. The blue rinsed bigots, the turnip taliban, and those who get excitable (if not excited) about what other people get up to in their bedrooms decamped from the Tory party en masse. Constituency chairs, Association board members, councillors, the yellowing grass roots were all outraged by Dave's concession to 21st century life. UKIP with its strident anti-Europeanism, little England sensibilities, its free market fundamentalism and, under Nigel Farage, its "libertarian" opposition to equal marriage hoovered these people up as members and supporters. It was this more than anything else that catapulted UKIP into the big leagues, it was a crisis in the Tory party that gave the UKIP project legs.
As we know, Dave completely and disastrously misread the danger to his own electoral coalition. Rather than fight them politically, he conceded ground on the EU referendum and immigration to try and lock them out from the right. And, well, here we are. However, while UKIP rode high and bagged themselves a couple of Tory MPs, from the standpoint of their own viability they made a critical mistake. In the local elections following the equal marriage crisis, in 2013, the year UKIP went big, they gained 139 councillors. In 2014, they went up 163 and won the European elections. And in 2015 they gained another 176 local authority seats. These gains came disproportionately from the Tories and yet, part connivance, part stupidity - I can't decide which - UKIP was said to pose Labour an existential crisis - a position they were happy to talk up. Lazy London commentators lapped it up too. Nigel Farage was the authentic voice of the non-metropolitan British working class (which they always identify with middle-aged-to-elderly white men). And while they were an irritant, they did not endanger Labour. For example, in the 2016 local elections, Labour was defending the 2012 high watermark established under Ed Miliband, with poor poll ratings and months of public infighting, the kippers netted just 25 while Labour suffered a net loss of 11. Despite the hype, Labour support was more resistant and proved so time and again.
Every new (or renewed) political party has to build a base around a stable(ish) set of interests if it's to enjoy a long shelf life. UKIP's error was believing its own hype. Had it gone harder on the Tories after 2013, it is reasonable to assume it would have been more stable and better placed to resist the exodus back. Last year they had the chance to change course, but instead plumped for the empty-headed Paul Nuttall, a man lacking thought beyond that morning's Daily Mail headline. He, his dimwitted followers, and not a few arms-length cheerleaders thought a Scouse accent would be enough to see Labour's northern strongholds fall to a purple surge. If only someone had argued this was bollocks all along. If UKIP wants to bump along the bottom of the polls and fall behind the Greens, then they should carry on with the "Labour first" strategy.
That said, humiliation in Stoke followed by an organisational and vote collapse, it appears that Nuttall has finally twigged, that it might be an idea to go for the voters that made the party and Farage a household name. He's standing in Boston and Skegness, a Tory-held seat in which UKIP finished a very strong second in 2015. It is also the Brexit capital of Britain. Yes, even more so than the Potteries. At the UKIP manifesto launch, apart from the ritual opportunistic sop to the NHS, this was "blukip", not "red UKIP": of holding the government to account on any Brexit backslides, of stressing one-in-one-out immigration over Theresa May's aspirational "tens of thousands" figures, and calling for a splendid isolationist foreign policy to keep Britain terrorism-free. Stuff plenty of hard right Tory voters would find attractive. The problem for UKIP is it might be too little too late, and the window of opportunity has slammed shut with them on the wrong side.
